How to Motivate and Inspire Your Employees: Part 1

This post is part of a series on insurance marketing and training sponsored by Astonish.

One of the most important lessons every agency owner must learn is how to motivate their employees. Unfortunately, understanding the best ways do this can be difficult. When it comes to motivating, two main factors can have a big impact on your success: goal setting and management style. This two part series will focus on improving the goal setting and management practices of your agency so that you can better inspire and train your employees.

Part 1: Setting Goals Can Help Accomplish More Than You Think

The first part of the series will focus specifically on setting goals for your agency and employees, and how that can improve their levels of motivation and productivity.

Setting goals for your agency is not a new concept. Agency goals help provide direction for the management team, help focus your efforts towards achieving specific objectives, and help track progress over time. However, it may not have occurred to you how the existence of goals directly impacts the work of your individual employees. Here are a few reasons why it’s crucial to set goals and involve your employees in them:

• Common goals create an improved work culture that encourages teambuilding and inter-department communication, which can result in new ideas and more productivity.
• Everyone, both managers and employees, tend to work more efficiently when they have a specific set of objectives to complete.
• Especially for employees who are a member of a group or department with many people, specific goals instill a feeling of personal accountability.
• You can’t manage something that you can’t measure! Goals allow tracking of employees’ performance over time, which in turn allows recognizing personal accomplishments.

Motivating your employees through goals means that your employees first must know what the goals are, not just the top managers. Consider having a section of your office dedicated to posting the goals of the month, quarter, and year. In addition to company-wide objectives, each department can have their own goals as well. Making the goals well-known, clear and most importantly, exciting, will help inspire your agency’s employees to work harder towards accomplishing them. You might be thinking, “How can I make goals exciting to my employees?”

Instead of sending a generic email containing an attachment of goals or listing them in a PowerPoint at your next agency meeting, why not announce them with a little more attention and enthusiasm? If you don’t seem excited about your agency’s goals, how can you expect your employees to be?

There is no doubt that rewarding and recognizing individuals for their achievements is more beneficial than punishing employees who are not being as productive. For that reason, make it a point to highlight the “rock stars” of the team that are providing positive contributions towards achieving company goals.

The bottom line is this: the presence of responsibility causes people to rise to the challenge and push themselves. Developing and displaying company, department, and even individual goals can provide employees with that crucial feeling of accountability that will motivate them to do better.

About the Author: John Boudreau, CEO and Co-Founder of Astonish, has been in the insurance marketing and technology business for nearly 10 years. He works closely with local insurance agencies across the country to understand what works and what doesn’t in an attempt to increase their share of the digital landscape through technology, marketing, and training solutions. Astonishhas ranked on the Inc. 500/5000 list of fastest growing private companies in the U.S for the past two years and recently ranked among the top five fastest growing private companies in the insurance industry.